Masters of the House

I couldn't give you any full shots of the kitchen with its new swanky painted cabinetry, because I haven't shared another sneaky project with you!

The lighting!

To date, the room has had just a single fluorescent rod on the ceiling. And let's face it. That's not particularly attractive now, is it?

So I've been dreaming of pendants. For quite a while now, actually!

I've been dreaming of this pendant for $104.95 from Wayfair.com ...

And this pendant for $107.95 from Wayfair.com ...
 

And this pendant for $131.95 from Wayfair.com ...

Pretty, aren't they? And pretty pricey when you start thinking about buying several of them!

But then, in having a sticky beak on the website of the fairly new competition to Bunnings in Australia, Masters, I found this guy!

Sure, he's not quite as shiny as the others, but I'm not shine-ist! See what I did there?

And his price tag is $39.97. Much better, thank you very much!

But then I had to decide exactly where he was going to go! So I did me some photoshopping. Note that this was pre-kitchen-cabinet-painting and pre-rangehood-hanging, so I photoshopped the rangehood in too.

So one option was to hang two pendants in front of the windows either side of the rangehood. The other was to hang them above the peninsula. But the moment I saw the peninsula-hanging option I was quite certain that was not going to happen. Too messy and non-symmetrical, don't you think?

So option one it was. And the right option it was indeed!

Aren't they just beeeyuuuutiful?

And we even bought a third one to pop in front of the window above the kitchen sink (which you can see I've spent a bit of time paint scraping lately, as well)!

And then to solve the problem of there being no light above the peninsula!
Because we didn't want to get involved in that busy non-symmetrical-ness that I experimented with above, these lights would have to be wall lights that we could conceal above the beam above the peninsula.

What to do... what to do...

IKEA!

Enter the HEKTAR wall lamp. It played nicely with our Masters pendants, but we could slot two of them in just high enough that they wouldn't interrupt the view to the pendants. And it was $19.99. Who can argue with that?

Tom hopped up and installed them (without any live electrical wires, we saved that part for the electrician)

Not too shabby, huh?

If I were a good blogger I would have taken a shot from the other direction to show that you can't really see the bottoms of those lights underneath that beam when you look toward the kitchen. But clearly I'm not. So you'll just have to take my word for it. What can I say? We're madly rushing to get this house done in time to move to our new one!

So how about a few more kitchen-painted and pendants-installed shots? Sigh. Isn't my kitchen just the most beautiful kitchen ever in the world? Don't answer that if your answer isn't a resounding YES!

We also replaced the off-centre strip fluro in the ceiling with a ceiling fan with a light. A slightly unconventional choice for a kitchen light, but we find that the kitchen gets quite warm, so a fan certainly doesn't go astray. And we'll get the electrician to move it so that it is centred off the rangehood soon. And of course patch that nasty un-painted section of the ceiling that removing the fluro left!!

So what do you think? Most beautiful kitchen ever, right?

Let There be Light!

It's magical what a lick (or a million licks, more accurately) of paint can do, but it's even more magical setting the electrician to work for a couple of days and seeing the transformation. Now our downstairs area looks like a really and truly house that people might live in!

Let's start small so we don't all get too overexcited. Because let me tell you, this is exciting! Got it?

This is the little niche cut out of the corner of our hallway with its very own special little downlight.

And here it is with much better lighting in daylight, cosying up with the new hardwired smoke alarm.

Now onto the bedrooms!

In the master bedroom we decided to put in bedside pendants, each with a switch on either side of the bed (and also one near the door). I did a lot of dithering over what I wanted for those pendants, and eventually just grabbed these two cane woven shades, thinking that I might spray paint them a different colour later on. But then they blended so nicely with the floor colour that I just decided to leave them!

What with the darker paint colour and the warm, woven pendant shades, that bedroom is lovely and cosy now!

 

The second bedroom is quite different. Much more suave and sophisticated with its fancy ceiling, which I'm now going to call 'coffered' because it sounds as fancy as it looks. When the electrician ran the wiring in the ceiling, we'd planned on centering the downlights off the main walls, but once the ceiling got built in, we realised that they wouldn't then be centered in the recessed sections which would look strange. So, we had some anxious finger-crossing time while the electrician made holes where we wanted the downlights to go and tried to pull the wiring through. Thankfully it worked!

We had also planned to have another fan light like in the master bedroom in the central bulkhead there, but unfortunately the fan would have hung too low to comply with the legal height for fan blades, so we had to scrap the fan idea and just go with an ordinary batten fitting.

I then popped down to Bunnings and grabbed something with a bit of bling that I thought might work nicely there and not hang down too low. I'm pretty pleased with the result!

And now to the bathroom! The bathroom caused me quite a bit of disappointment, actually, because almost from the very beginning I'd had my heart set on having a black chandelier in there to play off the black brick tile wall. I found a chandelier for the bargain price of $100 at Masters, and the electrician installed it. Cool, huh?

 

I even found a matching wall light in black online at Oz Lighting that is actually the same design as the silver wall lights in our upstairs bathroom.

But then we hit a snag. The electrician was worried about my chandelier, because it wasn't waterproof and was within direct splashing distance of the shower head, so if some crazy person decided to point the shower straight at the chandelier we'd be in trouble. Apparently he wouldn't be able to sign off on the compliance of the light fitting with legal standards if we left the chandelier there.

I was sad.

But there's no arguing with legal standards, so I bought an external ceiling coach light that I was sure was weatherproof since it was designed to go outside, and the electrician installed that. It's not so bad, it's just nowhere near what I wanted. Sigh.

But after that disappointment, let's move on to the really exciting part! The main living area!

Here's the view from the garage door to the kitchen.

And if we turn slightly once we're inside, aah, beautiful pendants! They're the HEKTAR pendant light from IKEA, and they set me back $99 each.

And looking toward the lounge, we have another fan light.

We also positioned three downlights in the lounge, two on the front door's side of the bulkhead, one on the kitchen side. I figured that since we put the TV point on the window-less feature wall, the couch would probably go in the corner, so with the downlights there, it should be lighting a-plenty!

The electrician and I spent so much time trying to figure out the correct placement of those pendant lights. You wouldn't think it looking at it now, considering that they look like they line up perfectly, with the kitchen ceiling light centred between them, but a lot of thought went into that! The more intuitive positioning would have been just to place them at equal thirds along the benchtop. But they looked weird and non-aligned at thirds. So, we tried this quarter and three-quarter placement along the benchtop with a larger gap in the centre, and moved the kitchen light a little way along from its original placement so that it was centred between the pendants. And now I'm super relieved that I put in that much thought, because it looks so much better now!

What do you think? Does the lighting make the home?